On November 5th, UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center marked its 25th anniversary by welcoming internationally acclaimed novelist, feminist icon, and social activist Isabel Allende for an intimate conversation with Sara Guyer, the Irving and Jean Stone Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor of English at UC Berkeley.
After a warm introduction from ARC Director Beth Piatote, who described the Center’s mission as “thinking through the arts,” Allende and Guyer took the stage to applause from a packed room and online audience. It was, as Piatote...
At the Arts Research Center on October 29, Pushcart Prize, winning essayist Christina Rivera brought the ocean to Berkeley. Reading from her debut collection My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women, Rivera invited the audience to submerge into her world of vulnerability, ecological kinship, and the fluid shapes of motherhood.
The evening began with Rivera sharing how the book’s form, layered, fragmented, and tidal, mirrors her own life. “At the last minute, my publisher put the word ...
Each year, ARC curates, presents, and co-sponsors a season of events, under a unifying theme, and in coordination with our many partners on campus. For our 25th Anniversary year, the 2025/26 theme is RESURGENCE.
A livestreamed recording of the event will be available soon here.
Poets Jennifer Reimer and Aimee Suzara joined the Arts Research Center on October 16 for Poetry & the Mythic Imagination, an evening of readings and conversation moderated by Erika Higbee, Ph.D. student in English and Mellon-Chancellor Fellow at UC Berkeley.
Reimer and Suzara each read from their most recent collections, sharing work that...
Poetry & the Mythic Imagination: Jennifer Reimer & Aimee Suzara Poetry Reading and Conversation Moderated by Erika Higbee Thursday, October 16, 2025 6:00pm Location: Arts Research Center, Hearst Field Annex D23 Free & open to the public Presented by the Arts Research Center with support from the Dean's Office of the Division of Arts & Humanities and co-sponsored by the Dept of English, Asian American Research Center, and the Center for Race & Gender
Former ARC Director, Professor & Scholar of Modern and Contemporary Art
History of Art
Julia Bryan-Wilson's research interests include feminist and queer theory, theories of artistic labor, performance and dance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices. She is the author of four books: Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California, 2009, named a best book of the year by the New York Times and Artforum); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson,...
Super Futures Haunt Collective's performance and lecture is co-presented by the Arts Research Center and the Dept of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies, and curated by Roshanak Kheshti
